Inge Morath1923-2002

Inge Morath, who has died aged 78, was already a well-known photographer when she visited the set of John Huston's The Misfits in 1960. She had worked at the photo agency Magnum for more than a decade, yet the photographs she took on that set - in particular intimate shots of Marilyn Monroe dancing dreamily under a tree - were to bring her into an association with fame she could never have anticipated.

Morath got on well with Monroe and she also got on with Monroe's husband, Arthur Miller, who was there making alterations to his screenplay. When the shoot ended, Monroe and Miller split up; their marriage had long been on the rocks. A couple of years later, in February 1962, Miller married Morath. That August, Monroe died. A month later, Morath gave birth to a daughter, Rebecca.

'People were terrible to me,' Morath told me two years ago, 'It was just awful - you know, "How can you try to replace Marilyn Monroe?" I'd say "I'm not replacing her - didn't you ever have an ex-lover or an ex-husband?"'

The story is worth telling because of the extraordinary conjunction of events, though it's a shame that Morath's fame should have become wrapped up in that. However, she was too tough, and too talented, not to have taken it in her stride.

Morath could be discreet and outspoken by turns. The daughter of an Austrian, anti-Nazi science professor, she enrolled in the modern languages department at Berlin University, but was thrown out when she refused to join the National Socialist student organisation and was forced instead to assemble parts at Tempelhof airport. She escaped during one of the airport's frequent bombings. Morath said she learned the powers of observation that led her to become a photographer from having to keep her mouth shut during the war.

Though she worked with Robert Capa, she never became a war photographer - in fact war made her assume all photography to be propaganda, a suspicion she had to un-learn. Instead, she brought her quirky eye to bear on the world's ironies: she shot rows of middle-aged women rubbing their cheeks perplexedly, as they were taught how to apply face cream; a llama sticking its neck out of a taxi in New York.

Monroe may be the reason behind part of her fame, but there was an intelligence and a mischief in Morath's eye that won her her reputation, and was undimmed to the end.